Abstract:Wideband channel transfer function measurements were made for a 16-element transmit and 16-element receive, multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antenna array. The measurements were conducted using the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) open area test site (OATS), allowing analytic calculations of the channel transfer functions. The H matrix for the BLAST array was then determined from measured data and the link capacity was calculated using information theory. The theoretical link capacity was then calculated and found to be 22.16 Bits/Hz/s for horizontally polarized antennas and 22.19 Bits/Hz/s for vertically polarized antennas. It was then found that the measured results agreed with the theoretical calculations with 5% error using horizontally polarized antennas and with <0.3% error for the vertically polarized case. The objective of this work was to verify that wideband measurements could be used to accurately measure H and predict the capacity of a MIMO channel.

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